DaVinci Resolve Slow Motion and Speed Effects - 5 Methods

[Music] hi my name is patrick inhofer i'm with mixinglight.com and we are dedicated to developing the skill and craft of digital video color correction and finishing and delivery and yes now that resolve has editing and even fairlight infusion you'll find some of that even on our website as well and today we're talking about speed changes i've been in davinci resolve for 10 years speed changes have come a long way in davinci resolve used to be very simple changes we could make to our speed now we've got some very advanced optical flow and we can do all of these crazy speed warps and i'm going to show that to you in this movie right now and we're going to start with the simplest of scenarios which is you've shot some footage and you shot it cranked you shot it instead of 24 frames per second which would be a normal in the us or 25 overseas what if you shot it at 48 but you want it to play back at 24 and when you pull it into the software it's pulling it in at 48. so you shot this footage that you want to see in slow motion and it's playing back at the full frame rate that you shot in the camera how do you solve that problem well it turns out it's pretty simple i've got this footage here i picked up from red.com from their website and it's this is demo footage of theirs and as i play it down and let's go full screen on it it looks like it's playing back at pretty much full speed right doesn't look like it's slow motion and this looks like terrific footage that you would have over cranked so that when you play it back at 24 frames per second you get this beautiful slow motion effect well let's pull up our metadata panel up here in the upper right and the clip is highlighted and you can see that for some reason when it was pulled into davinci resolve for some crazy reason davinci resolve is reading this at 48 frames per second and when you see that here in the metadata inspector when you see 48 frames per second that's how fast it is playing back in the timeline so if you have a 24 frame per second timeline let's do that let's jump into a timeline here let's just grab this clip and even though this timeline is set up to play at 24 frames per second this clip is playing inside this timeline at 48 frames per second i'll hit play and now we're inside the timeline and it's still playing back in real time ah that can make a lot of people pull their hair out how do you fix this problem how do you change it so that the base frame rate is at the frame rate that you want that you can force it and here in davinci resolve when we make these changes we are not changing the footage on your hard drive these are meta data changes that we're making only happening within the software not changing the footage on your hard drive really important point to remember so now it doesn't matter if i do this from the media pool up here on the edit page or on the cut page up here or on the media pool over here it's all the same media pool on all of these pages so what i'm going to do is right click on this clip and choose clip attributes and here is where i'm going to set how this project interprets this footage in this case i don't want it at the recording rate of 48 frames per second i want it to play back so the slow motion looks awesome every time i edit it into the timeline at 24 frames per second and when i do this take a look at the duration here in the metadata panel and the duration just doubled to 16 seconds from 8 seconds when i come into the edit page and i go ahead and play this back let's go full screen oh look at that nice now we've got this nice beautiful slow motion effect happening and in fact we even cut out of it a little early because we've doubled the length of this shot but the edit itself didn't change its length so i can go ahead and pull this out so now i can get through and watch to the end of the clip and see that nice beautiful slow-motion effect that was captured in camera so the slow motion technically isn't being executed by davinci resolve it was captured in camera so this is a common problem that people run into and aren't quite sure the correct way of fixing in davinci resolve in truth in davinci resolve we've got multiple ways of making these types of speed effect changes the key here when do you want to go into clip attributes and make this change the key to remember is when you edit that clip into a timeline what speed do you want to see in that timeline that's what clip attributes is controlling what happens if i change it let's say i go into later in the timeline i use the same shot and now i want to play back at 48 frames and i get the bright idea that i'll just go into clip attributes and change it even though elsewhere i've got a playing at 24 frames what happens well let's try that let's right click come up here to clip attributes change this now to 48 frames per second click ok and you'll notice this is a relatively new behavior in resolve where the clip goes offline i'm not happy about this behavior it has gone offline changing it in the media pool has changed it here in the timeline if i had this shot more edited multiple places maybe taking different pieces of it the only way to fix these shots is to re-edit them into the timeline and by the way this is undoable so if i make this mistake as long as i haven't gotten too far along after having made this change i can just undo and we're now back to our clip attributes and we're back at our 24 frame per second frame rate so let's imagine that we've got this shot here and we do want it to play back at 48 frames per second later on so let's pick a little later section maybe right here so i'll mark an in a marking out and i'll just drag this down here and what i want to do now is play this section real time now let's take it a little further down the timeline because we've got some other shots here how would i do that without making this go offline without having to do the clip attributes thing now we're looking at how to execute a speed change there are two types of frame rate changes here in davinci resolve constant rate and variable rate the simplest of the two is the constant rate and we're going to start with the most basic command probably one of the first speed change commands that most editors learn because it's here on the edit page it's built into the user interface which is fit to fill let's take a quick look at that fit to fill will give us a constant rate speed change the way it works is simple let's say on this particular shot my producer tells me right after about that third burst of fire coming out from this car what we want to do is now get the rest of this race in the next second and a half in other words i am going to place an in point here i'm going to match frame it so i get the exact same frame on the source side i'm going to mark an end point there so that when i edit this in it's going to be a seamless edit but what i want to do is i only want the rest of this shot to last a second and a half so i'll come back over to the timeline side i'm going to press plus 1.15 hit enter that's about a second and a half technically on the out point it'll grab 1.16 you can see that's my duration right there because the out is always inclusive of the frame i'm on and i moved forward one one five all right on the source side what i want is the rest of this shot up until the car hits right there right behind this pole but before the fire pops out right about right about there that's where i want the shot to end so i'm going to press it out here so what i need to do is take this duration which is 10 seconds long and i need to make it fit into this one and a half second duration right it's called a fit to fill so what's going to happen is when i edit this shot in it's just going to take that entire 10 seconds we'll take this little section of the timeline so i'm going to click drag and go ahead and fit to fill when i do that it overwrites what was underneath it and it adds this little section let's delete this tail end come back hit play and see what we get boom so you can see that entire rest of the race that 10 seconds just fit into a very short duration using the fit to fill command you can also find the fit to fill command up here on the edit menu scroll on down there's fit to fill and it also has a shortcut of shift f11 one thing to be aware of is it works best really on the edit page that's where you'll find this command is most reliable i've always had trouble getting this to work on the cut page even though in theory it should fit to fill is great when you know that you've got one duration you need to fit in the other duration in this example we sped the shot up but you can also slow it down so if you've got a three second hole and you've got a 15 frame clip you can fit to fill that and that 15 frames will slow down precisely to the number needed to fill that hole that you've pre-defined remember the key here is you want an in and out point on your timeline you want an in and out point on your source footage and then fit to fill will do whatever it has to do at precisely the speed it needs to do it in order to make that fit happen now once you've got a clip in the timeline and you then want to change the frame rate you can do that but it's different on the cut page than it is on the edit page to be more precise on the cut page you have fewer options so you have some very basic controls for manipulating time on the cut page whereas on the edit page you have a lot more options that really open up some advanced workflows so let's start with the simple approach first on the cup page so i'm going to jump down here into the cut page and there are two places where we can access our speed controls one is to open up the tools palette this little palette right here with these little widgets there and when i click on that it opens up a whole bunch of tools in here the only one we're going to look at is the speed control tool and i'm going to close this because i'll show you another way a kind of shortcut of getting there which is to right-click with your mouse you right click and you choose change speed from this contextual menu when you do that it opens up the tools palette and it automatically opens you into the speed control down here is a speed control the only thing you can really control here is this speed here and there are two ways of controlling this you click and drag left and right clicking and dragging to the right will speed up the shot which means it gets shorter because it's playing back faster so if i let go you see the clip down here shortened up i'm actually playing this back at 2.25 times speed or 225 percent speed and i'm going to play into out let's command f to get a full screen move my mouse and now we're going to loop through and yeah you can see that's playing now at a much faster speed or i can go even slower by clicking and dragging to the left and notice as i click and drag the clip is now going to get longer down here because it's going to take more time to play through this so let's take a look at that and yeah you can see it is now playing in way slow motion super slow motion so this is a basic speed effect here on the cut page it doesn't get any more complicated than that very basic tool a lot of us don't like thinking in terms of this .38 or 1.0 so if i hit one now we're back to normal speed a lot of us me included don't really like uh thinking of it in terms of this i think in terms of frames per second or percentages if you want that then you're going to jump into the edit page so this is the section we've been working on right down here what i'm going to do is right click and choose change clip speed now what happens is i get this menu item this change clip speed menu item and now i'm thinking in percentages and i'm thinking in frames per second and i can enter in either one of these i can hover scrub to go faster slower notice i change one it's going to change the other it also showing me the new duration of the clip as i change it or if i wanted to say play this at 75 percent i could just click it at 75 percent so it's a slight slow motion effect zoom in and let's go ahead and loop that around and yeah you can see it's a slight slow motion effect going on there we're not playing back at normal time the other thing you can do and this is probably easier to show on another timeline so i've got another timeline set up for us here where we've got this boxer and i'm going to just mute out this audio because it's not needed and let's play this through so i've got the female boxer and so she's in slow motion on the first clip and full speed on the second clip all right and let's say that we want to speed her up on the first clip so what i'm going to do is right click choose change clip speed i get this menu again and now i want to double time her i want to play her back at 200 percent so i'll come down here and that's 48 frames per second hit change now notice her clip got shorter but it left the second clip exactly where it was why was that let me undo let's take another look that's because i didn't enable ripple sequence so if you want to do a slow down and pull everything behind it either push it back because you're lengthening it out or pull it out because you're shortening it while speeding up you're going to want to enable ripple sequence so i'm going to change this to 200 it brought the clip with it this is something you have to be careful of it can be very dangerous if you're not careful but when it's useful to you it's really useful it saves you a couple mouse clicks all right so now let's go ahead and take a look and see how this is playing down yeah so she's playing back now way more feeling like real time i imagine she was probably recorded at 48 frames per second which is about where we're playing her back right now so now on the second shot if i want to slow it down we just speed it this shot up change clip speed and now let's slow it down to 25 6 frames per second we're playing it back now i don't care about rippling the sequence because i don't have anything behind it so i can turn that off if i want change and notice when i did that the clip didn't automatically get longer so it's not going to ripple the sequence unless you tell it to ripple the sequence so now i have this wide shot playing back slower in the same duration that i had originally played it back at and so we're probably going to want to have to take this and lengthen it out to get a couple shots in before we move on to the next shot regular speed and then she goes slow motion what if we think it's a little weird that we're going from regular speed and immediately to the wide shot in slow motion what if we want to slow her and ramp her down in the middle of that that bouncing up and down in that hero shot getting ready to take a punch here's where things get lots of fun where we move into re-time effects re-time effects are those fancy slow-motion and speed up effects where you see it ramp down into slow motion or ramps back up into full speed or hyper speed and so that's what we're going to look at next here in resolve are these re-time effects we're going to look for that point where we want to slow her down and i'm going to take it on this action here if we just go to single screen here let's make this a little larger so we're going to take it right there where you really see her kind of her eyes she blinks and then her eyes come up right there is where we're going to start slowing her down and so i'm going to do is having selected that frame right click and open up my retime controls and you'll see that i've got a new kind of ui showing up here so i've got the speed change little icon pops up here i've got these little blue arrows showing me that i'm in a retime mode and it's actually showing me already it remembers that i sped this up to 200 percent all right so what i want to do now is i want to click this little disclosure which opens up this fly out window and it gives me a bunch of options and we're going to start up here with add a speed point remember we already selected where we want this speed change to happen we've already set ourselves on the frame so now all i need to do is go ahead and add a speed point and right where we're sitting it adds a speed point i can change the speed point but the other thing you'll notice is when i add this speed point i've got 200 on the right and 200 on the left so let me undo this and and watch this behavior here i'm going to undo so now we have just one pull down disclosure and a speed point now i've got two pull down disclosures this means i can change the speed before the speed point and the speed after the speed point so now what we want to do is remember we hit the speed point and we want to slow her down so what we're going to do is change the speed from 200 down to 100 now when i play through this option f move my mouse out of the way there we go so she starts out in real time and then she just quickly hits right on that frame where we set that speed point she quickly slows down now i can even do that and get a little more dramatic with it maybe right here at the beginning we start her in slow motion she speeds up and then she slows down again i can add another speed point here and maybe we start her at 75 percent there so notice when we're slowing down these arrows turn yellow and they get further spaced apart when we're speeding up they're blue and they're more compressed and then when they're playing at 100 they're blue but they're evenly spaced all right so now what's going to happen here i hit play she speeds up slows down and then we go into the wide shot now once we add these speed points we're not locked into where they are you'll notice in this ui i've got two different thumb tabs here i like thinking them as thumb tabs right these are points where you can kind of place your thumb on them and drag them so what happens if i drag the lower point if i click and drag you'll notice that as i drag the point the speeds are staying the same on either side of the speed point but what's happening is i'm including more and more frames so in this case this is doing a 200 speed up so the shot is actually getting shorter as i do this because i'm delaying when this next speed effect takes place i'm changing the frames this is showing when i'm clicking and dragging it's showing me the frame at the moment where the speed and the next speed change takes place i can do the same thing up front and pick exactly let's say right on her eye blank right there boom that's where i want that effect to start speed back up and then as her hands move right here right when the gloves pass each other right there is where i want the next speed change to happen and then this one we're really going to slow down and we're going to change this down to 50 percent keep an eye on the numbers on either side of the speed point 50 and 200. when i click up here notice that the frame doesn't change anymore the viewer up top is where the playhead is it's not updating for me like it was when i click down here when i click up here it's just saying oh you just want to either slow down or speed up the section to the left of the speed ramp so i'm staying at 50 here i'm only affecting the speed effect to the left of my speed point so maybe what i really want is to go from 75 up to 142 then down to 50. let's play that through so i've got you know kind of a weird little thing going where she's playing slow motion faster motion and then slow motion again in fact let's even take this 50 and really slow it down to 25 just to make the point there we go and then she's really coming in for the punch and then away we go right but what about that really smooth transition that we might want to make well that's where we go into the re-time curve so i'm right-clicking on the clip itself we jump into the retime curve and now let's give ourselves some more room here yeah now you see it now you see it we've got our curve so i can select this point change this from linear into a slope and now i can really change how this effect and i if i drag up and down you can see how i'm at changing both sides of the effect in order to ramp this exactly the way i want it i'll grab this here change that into a curve i can pull this out in order to smooth out that ramp i can not move it up and down you'll notice it only goes left and right it doesn't go up and down but i can drag this in either direction to change the speed on both sides of the effect and now if we hit home shift f let's see what we've done to ourselves here slows down and you notice we've overwritten this back shot as this got longer it kept just over writing this shot next to it which we'd have to lengthen out and finally i want to show you something that happens whenever you're doing slow motion and your the the computer is generating extra frames in order for you to make the slow motion happen which is we're playing this back at 32 and we know that we didn't record as many frames as we're playing back and the computer's just doubling up those frames is there anything you can do to make this image look a little less stuttery so if i set this into loop and play it back you can notice like on her gloves and you know her arms it just feels very stuttery it doesn't feel smooth it kind of feels like this is a little bit computer generated what can we do to solve that well there are effects in here so if we have this clip highlighted and we're in the edit page we jump up into the inspector and if you scroll down there's retime and scaling double click to open that and the retime process if you have davinci resolve studio you can jump into optical flow and now when i go full screen let me turn on this loop you see that the jumpiness goes away we actually have a very smooth looking image this is what you get when you upgrade to davinci resolve studio if you try this you can try this on the free version of resolve and you'll probably end up getting a bunch of watermarks on here so just turn it off the watermarks go away but optical flow is one of those things where it uses advanced image algorithms to make in between frames to smooth out that jitteriness and that can be very very useful so if you're looking for something like that you know it exists you don't know where to find it davinci resolve now you do it's under retime and scaling under the properties for the individual clip did you happen to notice some problems near the end of that shot with that optical flow the optical flow looked great it really did eliminate a lot of that stutteriness we were seeing in the motion and that's exactly what you want optical float to do to create frames where none existed before but in the process you can somepla sometimes create artifacts and what do those artifacts look like they were just there but they're often not where you're looking so when you're using optical flow it's really useful to take a critical eye to the rest of the shot what am i talking about well let me go ahead i'm going to play down i'm going to put an in and out point in here so that we can loop around it turn my loop on all right let's watch down and take a look at this optical flow looking at her gloves they look great but if you notice back behind her at the american flag especially where the flag gets close like right right about in here in this range right in here watch what happens as her gloves pass over a lot of this very fine detail and the motion estimation runs into a bit of a problem and you're going to see some kind of artifacting going on in there so let me go once ahead let's loop this around a couple times and keep an eye on that section and you can see it on the bottom row of the white stripes on the american flag you really see what it is i'm talking about there especially those last few frames you get this weird jutter that kind of gives gives away the optical flow is there anything you can do about that the answer is yeah there are possibilities of doing away with that and you can't always guarantee that these will work but they're options for us so if you come back to your retime and scaling in the inspector and you make sure the clip is highlighted so you know what it is you are adjusting when optical flow is enabled notice if i go to frame blend motion estimation disappears i can't adjust that because motion estimation is an optical flow adjustment once i do that motion estimation that opens up for me and i'm going to come down and change this off of project settings so what are we using now which of these processes is this project set up for let's jump up to our preferences and in the master settings if we scroll down to the very bottom you're going to see frame interpolation here and we've got retime and motion estimation mode so every time you edit a shot into the timeline however these are set up here in your preferences is the default settings that get applied to every single shot now they don't come into play until you turn on your retime and scaling they're ignored most of the time but when you start retiming or you start zooming up or shrinking down that's when these come into play the retime is set for nearest we overwrote that before for optical flow so let me go ahead and let's just switch that to optical flow now what is our motion estimation mode that is default here in resolve so if i take a look here we're looking at project settings under motion estimation well standard faster that's what is default if i open this up i've got several other options there's standard better and then in resolve 16 some new options were added enhanced faster and enhanced better so basically as you move up from top to bottom the further down you go the more processor intensive this becomes and so you're often working on a trade-off between quality and real-time playback maybe on your computer you can get real-time playback up to standard better and then you drop into one of these and now you have to cache things off in order to see your clip playback in real time so let's go ahead and let's assume that we've got a faster computer and we want enhanced faster so we'll select that that becomes our project default i hit save so even though motion estimation is set to project settings we've gone ahead and set the project to one of these enhanced modes now let's go ahead and take a look what happens here when we loop around keeping an eye on that flag and there we go already we're getting much better results you'll notice that the white stripe is no longer juddering her gloves still look very clean i do want to show you one more option which you can override and only exist on a clip level under motion estimation which is speed warp so as i said before as we move down these options they get more and more processor intensive let's hit speed warp and speed warp is going to be the most advanced of these algorithms it's also going to be the one that's most difficult for your computer to play back in real time let's go ahead and see what my computer does so full screen loop around and it's it's not playing back in real time it's very very slow it requires even on this computer a ton of processing power so what i'm going to have to do is turn on my caching so i'll go to playback render cache smart and now i'm going to get a little indicator and you can see that this red indicator means yeah i don't think i can play this back in real time let me cache this off so i'm just going to let this turn to blue so that now i'm going to get real-time playback loop around yeah and this is really really clean i'm not i'm only seeing a minimal amount of motion blurring around her boxing gloves and only the amount that i need to make it look natural i'm really happy with this so now you've got a good look at how optical flow works motion estimation now i'm pretty sure at the time of this recording speed warp is probably a studio only so you need the paid version of davinci resolve you can pull it up you'll just get some watermarks on it if you don't then that means they've made it part of the free version so it never hurts to try one of these features because over time things that used to be part of the paid version of resolve become integrated into the free version so never never hurts to give this a shot and see what you get so there you go a very in-depth explanation about changing clip speeds in davinci resolve three two different layers there's in the media pool and there's within a timeline within a timeline we have constant and then we have these variable these retime speed effects and then you can even get into the curve and you have some advanced controls there in the curves also in the retime controls there are a bunch of other options in there i didn't really go through but if you go through them they're relatively explanatory play around with them download some footage from red.com download some footage from the blackmagic website there will there is beneath this video a link to mixinglight.com we have a page that accompanies this video that takes you through everything we just talked about in a very succinct text format as well as links to where you can find this source footage that i downloaded and used for this presentation i really do hope i'll see you one day on mixandlight.com if you're interested in davinci resolve color correction editing finishing fusion definitely stop by give us a look and we'll be very happy to get you up to speed on davinci resolve and really help you develop your skill as your experience level with the software develops from mixinglight.com i'm patrick inhofer and i hope to see you again

Channel: MixingLight.com

Views: 2,615

Keywords: davinci resolve

Id: um422FRn7kE

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020